Microsoft is playing harder and harder. The company is using all kinds of maneuvers to fight against Google and your Chrome browser. Worst of all, what we tell you today does not surprise us. Because there have already been several times in which the Windows company has been discovered doing its thing. What has happened this time?
The Microsoft offices like to think of complicated and controversial ideas when it comes to competing with their rivals. The last thing they were found to be doing was modify the responses of your Chatbot to try to keep its users from switching to Google Chrome to take advantage of its features, such as fast downloads. A journalist from The Verge has witnessed this and has not hesitated to publicly expose the Windows company. Next, we tell you what happened next.
The chrome experiment
For Microsoft, saying “Chrome” is something that activates all the alarms in their algorithms. The company is prepared to deal with the interest that people may have in the rival browser and acts in different ways based on it. It does it in different ways, but usually in a lighter and more hidden way compared to what we tell you in this news. For example, if you search for “Chrome” on Bing right now, what you’ll find is a message that includes a sponsored result that says “No need to download a new browser.”
What has happened to this journalist, however, has been something unexpected. He says that he had bought a new computer and that I was on my way to do the chrome install. To do this, he opened the Edge browser included in the equipment and from its search bar typed “Chrome”. What he found as a result was a full-screen window of the Microsoft Chatbot, which responded to his request by saying it had searched for “news about Bing features.” But what black magic was that?
The Chatbot has its own tastes
Since what was happening was not believed, what Sean Hollister did was try again. He did the same search with the name of the Google browser and found a different answer, but along the same lines. All the Chatbot was doing was trying to “sweep home.” In view of the fact that it was perhaps a regionally isolated experiment, the journalist spoke with friends from outside his city and even from other countries. And they found that, although it did not always happen, yes that was quite common. That, in a way, is something that is very inelegant.
The problem of this type of maneuver by Microsoft is that the company is manipulating the use of its artificial intelligence assistant and shamelessly using it to advertise itself. Also, of course, you’re using it as a means of blocking the competition, which surely has legal ramifications that you don’t want to expose yourself to. But, above all, it undermines the credibility of an AI that is not exactly the most popular at the moment.
Anyway, Microsoft has already fixed the “situation”. Everything is back to normal as it always should have been and if you ask the Chatbot about Chrome it will give you a politically correct answer which is nothing wrong with it. You can see it below and it even includes several shortcuts to frequently asked questions about the Google tool. But it can be concluded that the noise made by the original article, which we link to below, has been what has caused the company to think twice about what it was doing.
